Comics for kids

When I was a kid all the comic books were pretty much kid-friendly (or at least not kid-unfriendly), thanks in great part to the Comics Code.

It occurs to me, though, that some comics were still kid-friendlier than others--or, rather, more kid-oriented than others. Generally these were those I had given up by second grade: the Archie books, the Disney books (actually I think this was pretty much just Uncle Scrooge at our house), the Caspers and Wendys and Richie Riches.

(While the latter titles are pretty clear in their intended audience, the Archie books were a little different. Real teenagers probably wouldn't have been caught dead with them, of course. This marks a trend where publishers who want to attract a particular children's age group try to make their book/comic/magazine appear to be aimed at a slightly older group. F'rex, the girls' magazine Teen was read almost entirely by pre-teens, and Seventeen was abandoned by girls well before they reached the titular age. The Archies were basically a vision of adolescence shared by adults and pre-teens.)

In any case, the kids I knew of who favored these books had left them by the wayside by junior high at the latest. And for most, that meant abandoning comics altogether.

What I'm saying is that when a comic is strictly kid-oriented (with little or nothing to offer the adult reader--or the teen reader, for that matter), I'm not sure that it actually does incline its readers to "graduate" to the next level of comic when they get older.